Tax Cuts Fool No One

Did you watch Congress try to fashion a tax cut that will appeal to average Americans, still satisfy social and religious conservatives and, at the same time, please the wealthiest constituencies?

It reminded me of a bunch of roosters trying to lay an egg.

The problem with all these various tax-cut packages comes when you do the arithmetic. Crunch them through a cheap calculator and apply them to individual or typical taxpayers, and you'll find that huge tax cuts that leap from a newspaper headline have a way of shrinking to a monthly tax savings equal to the price of a six-pack and a boiled potato.

Invariably, it turns out that, for a family of 12 working 4.5 jobs and paying on two second mortgages, an $800 billion, 10-year tax cut would mean that their tax liability would be shaved by $1.52 a month. Or a typical lion tamer paying alimony to four ex-wives would save 84 cents. An unmarried transvestite with huge costume deductions would end up paying $5 more. And a struggling bigamist hiding three wives from one another and barely managing to feed and house them all would get no relief at all.

Then just as invariably someone will point out that a typical senior health-management-organization executive making $145,000 - say, one in charge of denying benefits and shortening hospital stays - would save $10,000 a year. And an average two-yacht family making in excess of $500,000 a year would save 18 times the average annual dues of a country club.

Is it any wonder that polls show Americans are indifferent, not to say hostile, to this foolishness in which the tax cuts waved at them so enticingly turn out to be chicken feed in a working family's budget?

I've listened to the arguments of members of Congress seeking desperately to justify large tax cuts for the rich. They boil down to a plaintive whine that goes something like, ``Of course, the rich would benefit more from our tax plan, but, don't you see, that's because they pay more taxes.''

How true, how true. And how equally true that the rich can afford them, especially because capital-gains taxes and tax rates in the high brackets have been so vastly reduced in the past 20 years. With all their knavish plots, it's interesting that the congressional tax-cutters never considered the one tax reform that would have appealed instantly to most Americans and been intelligible to everybody.

This would have been of a new, simplified tax code in which most returns could be filed on a postcard.

Unfortunately, the tax-simplification cause has been kidnapped by the flat-taxers who want everybody to pay taxes at the same rate. In doing so, they would also rid the tax code of any concept of fairness and ability to pay, of any notion that the most financially fortunate of Americans owe a higher percentage of their income to their nation. They give tax simplification a bad name.